The Woodsman School Part Two: Advanced Class

This is me on the first day of class at The Woodsman School in New Hampshire, figuring out the logistics of melting snow then boiling the water over an open fire without shattering the old glass beer and  soda bottles I had available.

SURVIVAL SCHOOL
    
     I came into this whole wilderness survival thing sort of backwards, biting off more than I could chew on the very first try. For years, I was a reader of books on the subject, then later a watcher of TV shows and Youtube videos on the subject. I felt like I knew a lot about the art of staying alive in the wilderness, but I was not, until recently over the past couple of years, a practitioner of skills. I think they call that "book smarts."

     To make a long story short, I found an opportunity one weekend, via YouTube, to take part in a supervised experiment exploring the possibility of surviving a 72-hour scenario in the woods in a February, with not much more than a knife and the clothes on my back. Technically, I made it through the experience, but the thing I realized was that it would have been infinitely harder if it were real, and if I knew there was nobody around, and if I knew there was not a free breakfast at a nice diner the following Sunday morning. To be harshly critical of my own performance that weekend, my assessment is that if it had been a real situation, I would have ended up dead.

This experience is what made me decide to take wilderness survival classes.

ADVANCED TRAINING

     My first class was a basic survival class with Dave Canterbury at The Pathfinder School in Ohio. I cannot recommend a class like that enough. If you think you know everything there is to know about the subject, you will know ten times more after just that basic class. You can develop a passion for knowledge in the subject, which I seem to have done in these recent years, and that is why I decided to continue my education in an advanced survival class with Derek Faria at The Woodsman School in New Hampshire.

Woodsman School owner and Instructor, Derek Faria gives a demonstration and explains the finer points of making primitive fire with a bow drill during the Woodsman Advanced Class at the Woodsman School in New Hampshire.

     Derek is a friend and associate of Dave Canterbury, and they think about things in a similar way, but he also does things his own way, based on his extensive knowledge and varied training, including a career in the Army, his own research and training as well as teaching alongside Canterbury at his school in Ohio.

     In his own outdoor classroom, Derek has a way of doing two things on the very first morning of his class. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that  he gets you into the correct mindset for training, and does an assessment of what training you already have in a quick and clever way. For more on that, you will just have to take the class.

ADVANCED SKILLS

     During the Woodsman Advanced class, you are given certain tasks that must be completed in order to complete training. One of the big ones is primitive fire, and you must create a fire using that method at least one time before you will be permitted to make another fire by any other means. In other words...if you don't get the bow drill down, then you get to sleep in the dark night in a cold shelter without a hot meal until you get it done. This may sound harsh and off-putting to some, but remember, you are going into this class under an assumption that you have a certain level of woodsman skill, which you could learn in less demanding classes. That said, Faria is not unreasonable and he loves to see people succeed. His methods are thorough and he demonstrates every skill in detail before he asks his students to repeat them, then he remains to help them along.

Almost there....barely visible bubbles are starting to form in a found soda bottle I used to first melt snow, then boil the water on the first day of advanced survival training. Advanced methods for making water safe are explored in this class, and are also part of the requirements for successfully completing training.

 Other skills covered in the advanced class include primitive tracking and trapping methods, advanced techniques for making water safe to drink, signaling for rescue, and simple navigation.

In addition to obtaining a primitive ember, students are also refreshed on how to make a good tinder bundle and how to find the best materials to bring their ember to flame.

     Some of the requirements for completing training seem like menial tasks, and some are time-consuming or just plain annoying because of the attention they require, but there is training in those moments too. You learn how to keep at it under duress. For instance I had to burn a four-inch deep bowl into a stump, which took a day and a night and a morning of maintaining a main fire, then also maintaining a smaller fire on the stump that was hot enough to burn the depression in the wood. After that, I had to heat rocks in the fire and boil water in the bowl I just made. It is all easy but time-consuming stuff akin to watching paint dry.......but how would you pass the time if you were lost for 3 days without food?

Boiling water in a burned out stump with hot rocks...a good skill to know, but marginally useful in reality. The real training here, is in getting your mind to stay focused in a stressful situation.

     This sort of training teaches you to keep your mind focused, if nothing else. That ability is crucial in a survival scenario. Don't do it in class, you fail...don't do it for real...you might be dead..... and that is the beauty of so many skills learned in wilderness survival. They are often multi-layered teaching moments that develop mental skills and self-confidence anyone can use in daily life. You also learn from each new task that there is so much more to learn about this seemingly simple thing called survival.

WHY SURVIVAL SCHOOL?

     Wilderness survival training is not just for "Survivalists" and "Preppers." Wilderness survival training is for anybody who thinks they might have the possibility of getting lost in the woods, and it is also for people who like to be self-reliant, and who like to feel a sense of self-confidence. In other words, in my opinion, there is something in wilderness survival training for almost anybody. I recommend it, even if you are a person who lives in a Manhattan high-rise. Who knows when you might wake up in the middle of a cold night with no power and no running water? What would you do? People are still animals, with the same basic needs of food, water and shelter that they have always needed since the beginning of time. Everything else in front of you is artifice.

Wilderness survival skills are basic life skills that can be translated for use in all walks of life.

     There was a time not terribly long ago when I would walk into the forest and start to worry about things like bears, and Bigfoot, but I have come to realize that those scary creatures are just symbols for something else...fear of the unknown. All of these experiences have helped me cope with that fear and sequester it in the farthest reaches of my persona, even in my daily life.

Take a class at The Woodsman School ...or if it is too far away, find some place else that's just as good ...Learn to build a fire and become self-reliant.

(ALL PHOTOS ARE COURTESY OF THE WOODSMAN SCHOOL)